Case study · Urban Planning

Three offices, one workspace for ZPG.

Zone Planning Group's project files lived on an ageing on-premises NAS, and staff in Burleigh Heads, Gladstone, and Moss Vale all reached it across the wire. We migrated the firm to Microsoft SharePoint and built a structure that fits the way ZPG runs projects.

The challenge

A file system that hadn't grown with the firm.

ZPG had outgrown the NAS the practice was built on. Three offices across NSW and Queensland reached the same shared drive, the project library went back years, and the folder structure had never accounted for how many hands a project now passed through.

- 01

A NAS in one office, staff in three

The shared drive lived in the Burleigh Heads office. Staff in Gladstone and Moss Vale opened the same project files across the wire, and the round trip was getting slower as the library grew.

- 02

A project library that had outgrown its folders

Years of urban planning work sat behind a tree of folders within folders. Finding the right version of a 2019 development application meant knowing exactly where to look, and the institutional knowledge for that lived in a few people's heads.

- 03

Version drift on every active job

Multiple authors, sub-consultants, and external reviewers all touched the same documents. Without proper collaboration tooling, that meant lock files, names ending in "_FINAL_v3", and someone's afternoon spent working out which version was current.

01 · Site visit and proof of concept

We sat with the team before we proposed anything.

Our team leader and system administrator went to the office to see how staff were using the NAS, then ran a SharePoint proof of concept against real ZPG content before sign-off.

A hardware audit running in parallel for another piece of work told us what we needed to know: the network and endpoints could carry SharePoint, so the migration didn't need a hardware story bolted on. The proof of concept caught the friction points early, while changes were still cheap.

02 · A SharePoint built around ZPG

Year by year, region by region.

The first cut of the site structure breached SharePoint's container limits, too many items in too few buckets.

We split the project library by year and by region - Gold Coast, Central Queensland, and NSW Southern Highlands, matching ZPG's three offices - so each container held a sensible number of items and a planner anywhere in the firm could navigate to a project without knowing its full history. Document libraries, custom lists, and a handful of automated workflows came in alongside, plus activity reporting so the directors could see what was happening across the firm.

03 · Training that matched what we saw

We rewrote the manual after watching it being read.

We came in with thorough training documentation, and quickly realised we'd pitched it too high.

Staff sat across the spectrum from SharePoint-native to never-touched-OneDrive. We rewrote the introductory material to start from the basics - what a document library is, why SharePoint isn't a network drive in a different costume - before assuming any prior familiarity. Adoption picked up immediately.

The outcome

A practice that works the same from any desk.

The NAS is retired, the project library lives in one place, and ZPG's three offices work off the same content at the same speed. The structure follows the way the firm delivers work.

- 01

Three offices, one access experience

Project files open at the same speed in Burleigh Heads, Gladstone, and Moss Vale. There's no longer a head-office copy and two remote ones; there's one library, reached the same way from any desk.

- 02

Project files with a place to live

Content is organised by year and by region, so staff find what they need without keeper-of-the-folders knowledge. Search works because the structure is consistent.

- 03

Built for the way the firm delivers

SharePoint goes where the team does - Teams sessions, mobile devices, client sites. A planner reviewing a development application from a council meeting can pull up the file the same way they would from their own desk.

On an ageing NAS?

A document system shouldn't depend on which office you're in.

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